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Come On! Private Banks Poaching Fannie Mae

New Orleans On ESPN’s Sportscenter during the seasons they have a feature called “Come on!” in which they feature unbelievable or bonehead plays. We need that in other fields of public life and politics. Reading about the efforts of banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase along with the various trade associations to try to get their noses under the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac restructuring tent to shill a profit by issuing government secured mortgages, I could only thing: Oh, come on! How ridiculous!! These are the same banks that just brought us the Great Recession due to their irresponsible lending and securitization schemes, and now they should somehow be allowed to profitably issue government mortgages. Though by now we all ought to be used to the way that Wall Street thumbs their nose at all of the economic realities that all of us face, this is wildly unbelievable.

Reading the New York Times article by Louise Story, it was clear this was another predator’s ball with not only Wells and Chase at the trough, but also Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley. All of this reminds me of the scam that the Obama Administration stopped in recent years of allowing private interests to wildly profit as the middle men brokers for federally offered student loans. Banks were making out like, well how else can I say this, bandits. Stopping this sticky fingered scandal saved huge amounts of money, but now they are baaaaccccckkkkk with something perhaps even more outrageous.

The other backassedwards part of this is the problem of misdirected blame that still falls in the direction of Fannie/Freddie for supposedly bringing down the house by loaning to lower income citizens without looking at affordability or sustainability. I understand the ideological need to blame the poor, but it’s important to point out that there is still no factual evidence that these loans, that should have been encouraged by the government, had anything to do with the mess. Not only would we be throwing out the baby rather than the bathwater, but it seems we would be institutionalizing the bathwater and leaving the baby homeless, so to speak.

There’s probably a debate worth having about how many and how much of the “middle class” need to have federally guaranteed mortgages through these vehicles, but it seems obvious the we will need even firmer support for working class families in the future to have a chance at home ownership in we ever get out of this recession. We need to slap away the hands trying to pretend this is all a cookie jar, and tell them to not only mind their own business, but maybe even try to get better at it than they have been (let’s see banks portfolio more mortgages on their own before they claim to know how to issue others), and keep federal institutions trying to solve the puzzle of adequate and affordable housing for all Americans again.